R

E

A

D

 

T

H

I

N

K

 

C

R

E

A

T

E

 

clip_image001

 

 

                  

 

We have all reason to believe that the awareness generated from the physical system, using the brain, but we have very few know how to produce, or why it is All that exists. How the physical system, the brain as well as your experience? There are several reasons, it will be such a system? At the moment, we do not know how to answer questions. Between today's scientific theory, it is very difficult to actually touch the issue. Farreaching connection to explain the structure of physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and a higher level of behavior, consciousness as a sore throat, thumb his absence.

 

clip_image002

 

 

clip_image003

 

 

The Experiencer

 

 

Consciousness is the biggest mystery. It is probably the largest outstanding obstacle in our quest for a scientific understanding of the universe. The science of physics is not yet complete, but it is well-understood. The science of biology has explained away many of the mysteries surrounding the nature of life. There are many gaps in our understanding of these fields, but they do not seem intractable. We have some idea of what a solution that would fill these gaps might look like; it is just a matter of coming up with a theory that gets the details right.

 

Even in the science of the mind, much progress has been made. Recent work in cognitive science and neuroscience is leading us to a better understanding of human behavior and of the processes that drive it. We do not have many detailed theories of cognition, to be sure, but there are few problems of principle; the details cannot be too far off. But consciousness is as perplexing as it ever was. It still seems utterly mysterious that the causation of behavior should be accompanied by conscious experience. We do not just lack a detailed theory; we are in the dark about what a theory of consciousness would even look like.

 

We have good reason to believe that consciousness arises from physical systems such as brains, but we have little idea how it so arises, or why it exists at all. How could a physical system such as a brain also be an experiencer? Why should there be something it is like to be such a system? Currently, we do not know how to answer these questions. Present-day scientific theories hardly touch the really difficult questions about consciousness. In the farreaching explanatory structure that connects physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and higher-level phenomena, consciousness sticks out like a sore thumb by its absence.

 

All this means that the study of consciousness is difficult, but it also makes it exciting. In other domains, the shape of our worldview is becoming fixed. While we can expect minor revolutions in our understanding of physics, biology, and psychology, we may at least have got the basics right. With consciousness, we do not even have the basics down. We are entirely in the dark about how it fits into the natural order. This means that a correct theory of consciousness is likely to affect our conception of the universe more profoundly than any other new scientific development. Consciousness is both fundamental and unexplained; this makes for a potent cocktail.

 

Quite a bit of work on consciousness has appeared in the last few years, and one might think that we are making progress. But on a closer look, most of this work leaves the hardest problems about consciousness untouched. Often, this work addresses what might be called the “easy” problems of consciousness: how does the brain process environmental stimulation? how does it integrate information? how do we produce reports on internal states? These are important questions, but to answer them is not to solve the hard problem: why is all this processing accompanied by an experienced inner life? Sometimes this question is ignored entirely; sometimes it is put off until another day; and sometimes, it is simply declared that the question has been answered. But in each case, one is left with the feeling that the central problem remains as puzzling as ever.

 

I am an optimist about consciousness, not a pessimist: I think that we might eventually have a theory of it… But we cannot expect finding a theory of consciousness to be easy. Consciousness is not just business as usual: if we are to take consciousness seriously, the first thing we must do is face up to the things that make the problem so difficult…

 

Some say that consciousness is an “illusion”, but I have little idea what this could even mean. It seems to me that we are surer of the existence of conscious experience than we are of anything else in the world. I have tried hard at times to convince myself that there is really nothing there, that conscious experience is empty, an illusion. There is something seductive about this notion, which philosophers throughout the ages have exploited, but in the end it is utterly unsatisfying. I find myself absorbed in an orange sensation, and something is going on. There is something that needs explaining, even after we have explained the process of discrimination and action: there is the experience.

 

… The problem of consciousness lies uneasily at the border of science and philosophy. I would say that it is properly a scientific subject matter: it is a natural phenomenon like motion, life, and cognition, and calls out for explanation in the way that these do. But it is not open to investigation by the usual scientific methods. Everyday scientific methodology has trouble getting a grip on the problem, not least because of the difficulties in observing the phenomenon. Outside the first-person case, data are hard to come by. This is not to say that no external data can be relevant, but we first have to arrive at a coherent philosophical understanding before we can justify the data’s relevance. So the problem of consciousness may be a scientific problem that requires philosophical methods of understanding before we can get off the ground.

 

 

 

 

 

 

— David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind – In Search of a Theory of Conscious Experience (1996)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Indexes/23

 

 

clip_image004

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

0 comments:

O truth of the earth,
O truth of things,
I am determined to press my way toward you;
Sound your voice!

I scale mountains,
or dive in the sea after you.

Walt Whitman
po.t-pog.com - the text-only version of this site for quick browsing and better search results.

onwardpress.wordpress.com – text-only wordpress version